The present invention relates to a capper/de-capper device and method for attaching and removing caps from tubes, and, more particularly, a device and method for removing screw-threaded caps from tubes such as microtubes used in laboratories or micro-biological systems.
High value biological samples are often stored and processed using so-called SBS format racks containing a plurality of tubes. Such racks may contain, for example, 96 tubes in an array of 8 by 12 apertures designed to hold the tubes securely. The tubes and their contents may be manoeuvred in a processing system, for example between a cold store and various processing stations and may be required to be filled (partly or fully) or processed simultaneously or individually.
Conventionally, capping/de-capping has either been carried out by hand or else by means of a capping/de-capping unit individually engageable with the tubes either while they are still held in the rack or else after they have been separated from the rack. This is not only tedious (in the case of manual capping/de-capping), but also slow as it is usual for plural tubes to require processing in the same way at the same time.
It is known to provide a linear array of cappers/de-cappers to allow capping/de-capping of a row of tubes, but such systems have been bulky as a result of the dimensions of the drive mechanisms of the capper/de-cappers, the close spacing of the tubes requiring the drive mechanisms of the cappers/de-cappers to be remote from the capper/de-capper heads and disposed over a larger footprint than the rack because of their size.
The present invention is aimed at overcoming these problems and providing a capper/de-capper which can cap or de-cap a two-dimensional array of tubes simultaneously.